The worst thing that can happen to someone is when you have a problem and you look online to help solve that problem. Take for instance the problems that I am having with linux. Many things are not working, or I want to install some stuff and I am stuck somewhere and I need some help to bail me out of that situation.
The first thing that I do usually is to go out and look up on the internet.
Previously – 3-4 years back, when I was stuck on linux and I googled(searched) up something, it was extremely likely that I would get what I wanted within the first 5 results(if not the 1st itself). This was because only relevant information was available on the internet. Now I hardly ever find anything on what I want.
Today the internet is more about propaganda than an store house of information. The top 10 sites are especially built with keywords to garner clicks. The next 10 sites are affiliate marketing and promotions which ask you to buy a $100 product at a special going rate of $50 and so on. Then there is crap from forums and mailing lists and stuff which end up in the high ranked results and is generally nonsense or random gibberish.
After you sift through these vast pages of junk, it is only then that you will find the information that you have been looking for. This is extremely crazy.
Someone has to do something about this. This will be the next big thing on the internet. For example, someone has a problem on the installation problems of product xyz. Now there will be 200 threads on 50 forums where people are posting this problem and others are abusing the software company and other general banter. But finally, only 1 or 2 replies will make sense out of the problem at hand and give a solution. When I am searching, I want these answers as my results and not the other rubbish. Similarly, lots of content are copy pasted and manipulated and distributed all over the web. There should be a filtering mechanism to weed out such duplicates.
How I see the lifecycle of information on the internet is
Scarce -> Little Bits -> Important Points -> Complete coverage -> Duplicity -> Revenue-oriented spam -> Impossible to find anything.
This has to be nipped at the complete coverage part. The search engines should weed out the last stages. There should be a process to review the content and filter things out regularly. Only when this is done, will the internet be a place to garner knowledge from. Till then, and these days, I am content checking mails for that is the only thing that I can do these days which is exactly what I want.
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Tagged: content, information, internet, search